Top 100 Quotes About World Literature
#1. National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#2. I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Edward Abbey
#3. I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.
Baldur Von Schirach
#4. Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
Edward Abbey
#5. For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)
Margaret Bald
#6. My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.
Mo Yan
#7. To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.
Susan Sontag
#8. So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic.
David Cronenberg
#9. I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.
Pat Conroy
#10. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.
Peter Gizzi
#11. For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full.
Rashers Tierney
#12. The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
James Buchan
#13. There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.
Len G. Murray
#14. There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
Sherman Alexie
#15. Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.
Mira Jacob
#16. And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
Thomas Keneally
#17. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#18. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.
Gail Carriger
#19. The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.
Mark Van Doren
#20. When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#21. Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller
#22. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
#23. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.
Val Kilmer
#24. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie
#25. ...if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
#26. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
#27. Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.
Terry Tempest Williams
#28. The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.
Katherine Paterson
#29. That's the great thing about literature
it makes the world less lonely.
Robert Stone
#30. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Christopher Dawson
#31. You see the world in colors,
I see in Black and Red.
Irum Zahra
#32. Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
#33. I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.
Diablo Cody
#34. Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world," I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be - it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration.
Jasper Fforde
#35. Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.
Aminatta Forna
#36. And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.
Matthew Quick
#37. Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.
Nadeem Aslam
#38. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#39. The end of the world can be cozy at times.
Mohsin Hamid
#40. Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.
Louise Rosenblatt
#41. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
#42. My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.
Dejan Stojanovic
#43. For when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the world - it was to open then minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of literature.
J.M. Barrie
#44. I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.
David Tennant
#45. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.
Paul Tillich
#46. You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.
Toni Morrison
#47. Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
Alice Eve
#49. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.
Dejan Stojanovic
#50. Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
George Steiner
#51. It perhaps might be said
if any one dared
that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.
Stephen Crane
#52. I'd be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle in their gloomy cave and kiss each other's asses, and lick each other's wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature.
Haruki Murakami
#53. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.
Penelope Lively
#54. I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.
Jamaica Kincaid
#55. One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.
Kevin Sampsell
#56. People didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.
Jeanne DuPrau
#57. Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get you arrested, lol.
Kevin R. Hill
#58. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
Gao Xingjian
#59. I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#60. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
#61. The Meadow ... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here ... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.
James Galvin
#62. No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers..
Himmilicious
#63. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
#64. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#66. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross Macdonald
#67. Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.
David E. Fessenden
#68. So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.
Charles Dickens
#69. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#70. Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world.
D.H. Lawrence
#71. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#73. Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
W.B.Yeats
#74. I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.
Dejan Stojanovic
#75. Education for women is something that has plagued the world for a very long time. When I saw this problem firsthand, I knew I had to write about it.
Sahndra Fon Dufe
#76. These are the stories of travelers on a spiritual quest between worlds. Part mythmaker, part poet, Omar Castaeda is an original, and these stories are unlike any in our literature.
Toi Derricotte
#77. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Nigel Hamilton
#78. The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization.
F.L. Lucas
#79. Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
John Cheever
#80. If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago
He would've thought they were birds
Or angels from another world
Or messengers from other planets.
Dejan Stojanovic
#81. The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
Deborah Harkness
#82. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
Claire Colebrook
#83. Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.
Janine Di Giovanni
#84. This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.
Dejan Stojanovic
#85. The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
Bernard Bailyn
#86. The things of the world fell by the wayside, you lost your speed and your eyesight and your fucking Electric Boogaloo, but literature was eternal,
Stephen King
#87. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
#89. How very dull our lives would be without literature! How very much dark and poor, how so sad and empty the world would be!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#90. In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.
Wole Soyinka
#92. Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.
Mary MacLane
#95. Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.
Chad Harbach
#96. [Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.
Amos Tversky
#97. Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world....The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#98. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Dinaw Mengestu
#99. ... And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.
Leonardo Sciascia
#100. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
